(Un) Filteted Expression: Juxtaposing American and Indonesia Male Beauty YouTubers

Abstract

YouTube is integral in everyone’s everyday lives. Despite being highly saturated, beauty contents outweigh other categories. In 2019, three out of four most-subscribed beauty YouTubers were male, which is an anomaly because ‘male’ and ‘beauty’ are never used to define one another. The predicament shifts as user-generated contents facilitated by social media give rise to male beauty YouTubers. Although early beauty YouTubers were mainly Americans, their subscribers came from all around the world. Witnessing them expressed their true selves and achieved success attracted their subscribers, including those in Indonesia, to be creators as well. Given the socioeconomic and cultural differences between the US and Indonesia, this research aims to compare the American and Indonesian male beauty YouTubers. Within Transnational American Studies, production analysis of popular culture is used to analyze three American male beauty YouTubers: James Charles, Jeffree Star and Bretman Rock; and three Indonesian male beauty YouTubers: Jovi Adhiguna, Andreas Lukita and Yudhistira El Vedayadi. The findings show Pieterse’s three paradigms of globalization. (1) Cultural differentialism is apparent in their aesthetic and their attitude regarding their sexual orientation. (2) Cultural convergence is noticeable as they all talk in drag lingo, accompanied by over-the-top feminine body language. (3) Cultural hybridization is seen as they accentuate femininity, yet still maintain masculinity. In sum, offline lives are transported into online lives. Subscribers demand authenticity from the YouTubers they watch, the unfiltered ones thus can gain global success, while the filtered ones cannot.